Successful commerce in goods depends on efficient delivery of items to customers. For bulk shipments to retailers, manufacturers who do not maintain a fleet of trucks often hire independent carriers. As for delivery of products to end users, recent years have witnessed a dramatic growth in the volume of products shipped to end user customers from stores, from mail-order catalog warehouses, and directly from manufacturers. Parcel delivery carriers provide delivery services to end user customers, whether they are individuals or businesses.
This surging shipping business has been fueled by the growth of e-commerce conducted over the Internet. Individuals and businesses find it convenient to order goods using a Web browser, and a multitude of e-commerce sites offering a wide variety of goods have gone on-line. In addition to buying and selling goods and services, more and more firms use the Internet to manage their businesses.
For all of these transactions, a carrier must be engaged to deliver the ordered goods. Historically, this step has been treated as a second transaction, often as complex and time consuming as the original sale of products. Carriers have offered various levels of service, ranging from ground delivery, to overnight delivery, and delivery early the next morning. Customers may visit a store-front drop-off station, drop off a parcel at a kiosk, or arrange for a regular pick-up by the carrier. Telephone ordering of pick-up as well as delivery services has been offered.
Some attempts have been made to streamline the process of arranging for pick-up and delivery. In the case of large volume carriers such as manufacturers or large retailers, carriers have provided personal computers and software to the carrier to allow the carrier to connect to the carrier's computer system for the purpose of submitting orders for delivery services, providing details of the items being shipped, printing shipping labels, accessing tracking data to determine the status of shipments, and obtaining reports of shipping activity. These approaches have required special equipment such as a personal computer, terminal units, or smart telephones, often dedicated to the purpose. Specific application software must be loaded onto each terminal unit or computer. Thus, such solutions cannot easily be made available to large numbers of individuals and small business users.
For the convenience of individuals and small businesses, some Internet sites have provided rate calculators that can be used to determine which carrier charges the best rate for a particular parcel. These sites have not provided the means to actually order the services of a carrier, nor have they dealt with the complexities of on-line payment and transaction security that are an essential part of e-commerce.
Carriers have provided access to tracking information via the Internet. However, these services have not been integrated with a convenient method for ordering and paying for delivery services.
A particular system with additional features, primarily for carriers who have their own predefined set of shipping requirements, is shown in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,485,369 and 5,631,827. This networked system addresses order processing, order fulfillment, transportation of goods, and tracking. However, this system does not deal with how the carrier is contacted to pick up the goods, and thus does not give the carrier any advance notice of what must be shipped for planning purposes. Nor does this system address the problem of how a carrier employee presented with a parcel bearing a label printed by a customer can determine whether the customer has paid for or committed to pay for the delivery services.
Thus, despite some advances in the field, there remains a need for a single automated solution for any and all of the above-described delivery ordering scenarios, accessible to large and small volume users through equipment already owned by the users. There has been a further need to solve the foregoing problem by utilizing the power and flexibility of the Internet. The solution should provide even to individual or occasional users the convenience and flexibility of the ordering and tracking systems heretofore available only to large carriers connected to carriers via a modem or private network.